Studies in Old English Element Order with Special Reference to The Vercelli Homilies Susumu Hiyama Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language Faculty of Arts University of Glasgow June 2002 Susumu Hiyama 2002 ProQuest Number: 13833935 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 13833935 Published by ProQuest LLC(2019). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 (GLASGOW UNIVERSITY LIBRARY: , " W , n - Copy I 2 ABSTRACT This study provides a descriptive analysis of the language of The Vercelli Homilies using Donald Scragg's 1992 EETS edition. The total of over six thousand clauses is analysed, for the first time, with particular reference to element order. The syntactic characteristics of this collection of twenty-three anonymous homilies written in the late tenth century will be addressed, and some general issues to do with Old English syntax will be discussed. Chapter 1 furnishes a background for this study. Here are provided a general description of the Vercelli Book and a brief overview of the previous studies on Old English element order. This chapter also clarifies the need for a close study of element order of The Vercelli Homilies , addressing relevant questions and providing details on the methodology adopted in the present study. Chapters 2 and 3 illustrate element order patterns in each of the fourteen clause categories with copious examples and full statistics. In addition, the examples are accompanied - where available - by the Latin sources and sigla as defined by Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: A Register of Written Sources Used by Authors in Anglo-Saxon England. Attention is paid to deviations from the 'normal' element order in each category. These chapters show that many of the exceptions may be explained in terms of grammar, context, discourse, style, and Latin influence. Chapter 4 summarizes the findings in the present study with special emphasis on the position of each element. These findings are further supplemented by the Appendix where various statistical information on syntactic characteristics in each homily is offered. 3 LIST OF CONTENTS PREFACE 5 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 6 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 7 NOTES ON PRESENTATION 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 8 1.1 Aims 8 1.2 Previous Scholarship 10 1.2.1 A Sketch 12 1.2.2 Models for the Present Study 14 1.3 Problems 17 1.3.1 The Latin Sources 17 1.3.2 The Vercelli Poems 21 1.3.3 Two Studies 22 1.4 Elements 23 1.5 Clauses 29 1.6 Method 31 1.7 Samples 33 CHAPTER 2 INDEPENDENT CLAUSES 35 2.1 Non-Conjoined Declarative and Exclamative Clauses 35 2.2 Conjoined Declarative and Exclamative Clauses 69 2.3 Imperative Clauses 93 2.4 Interrogative Clauses 96 2.5 Optative Clauses 103 2.6 Summary of Chapter 2 106 CHAPTER 3 DEPENDENT CLAUSES 107 3.1 Nominal clauses 107 3.2 Adjectival clauses 130 3.3 Adverbial Clauses 149 3.3.1 Clauses of Place 149 4 3.3.2 Clauses of Time 151 3.3.3 Clauses of Consequence 166 3.3.4 Clauses of Cause 181 3.3.5 Clauses of Comparison 197 3.3.6 Clauses of Concession 209 3.3.7 Clauses of Condition 219 3.4 Summary of Chapter 3 231 CHAPTER 4 CONCLUSION 233 4.1 Summary of Findings 233 4.2 Concluding Remarks 243 APPENDIX 245 BIBLIOGRAPHY 250 5 PREFACE The Vercelli Homilies consist of twenty-three anonymous homilies in the Vercelli Codex. This collection of late tenth-century homilies was edited - for the first time - by a single editor (Donald Scragg) in 1992. Before the publication of this edition, scholars had to combine two editions - one by Max Forster and another by Paul E. Szarmach - to study the whole collection; although both editions are the results of masterly scholarship of the editors, it is far from ideal to consult the two editions which naturally lack consistency. It is then fitting that we now study the homilies using Scragg's new edition. This study analyses the language of The Vercelli Homilies with particular reference to element order, supplementing the detailed phonological and morphological analysis of the same collection by Donald Scragg (Scragg 1970, 1992). My great indebtedness to previous scholarship - in particular to such syntacticians as Bruce Mitchell and Viljo Kohonen - is evident throughout the study. The analysis uses the categories of the traditional, Latin-based grammar (as in Mitchell's Old English Syntax ) and offers a descriptive account of the types of element order that appear in the corpus with copious examples and full statistics, based on which syntactical characteristics of the homilies, as well as problems of Old English syntax, will be addressed and discussed. 6 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION I declare that this thesis embodies the results of my own special work, that it has been composed by myself and that it does not include work forming part of a thesis presented successfully for a degree in this or another University. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my supervisor, Professor Jeremy J. Smith, for sharing his scholarship. I am also grateful to the following institutions: the Rotary International (ambassadorial scholarship for the academic year 1993-1994); Universities UK (formally CVCP; ORS award for the academic year 1995-1996); Komazawa University (study leave from April 2001 to March 2003); and University of Manchester (for accepting me as an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Department of English and American Studies from April 2001 to March 2003). Finally, I must thank above all my parents, Hiroshi and Yoriko Hiyama, without whose unfailing support I could not have completed this study. 7 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CH JElfric's Catholic Homilies: The Second Series EEMF Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile EETS Early English Text Society Fontes Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: A Register of Written Sources Used by Authors in Anglo-Saxon England Guide A Guide to Old English (6th ed., by Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson) NM Neuphilologische Mitteilungen NQ Notes and Queries ns new series OES Old English Syntax (by Bruce Mitchell) os original series RES Review of English Studies SH Homilies o f Hslfric: A Supplementary Collection ss supplementary series VH The Vercelli Homilies NOTES ON PRESENTATION Old English examples are cited with homily number and line number, as in 1.234 (Homily I, line 234). All line references are to the line in which the particular clause begins. The Tironian sign (7) is represented by ampersand (&) throughout this study. Latin sources are, in accordance with Scragg's (1992: lxxxi) practice, ‘quoted from edited texts where these are available, but silently emended to achieve consistency of presentation, e.g.j and v are printed i and u respectively, punctuation or capitalization are regularized and Deus is capitalized.’ 8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This opening chapter sets out the aims of the present study and deals with previous scholarship, corpus, and method. I follow Bruce Mitchell’sOld English Syntax (§3887 and passim; hereafter OES) in using the term 'element order' rather than 'word order' since the former is a more accurate description; nevertheless, the latter is to be found below in quotations, being the more prevalent term in the scholarly literature. 1.1 Aims The Vercelli Homilies (hereafter VH) consist of twenty-three anonymous homilies contained in the manuscript known as the Vercelli Book, which is described by Scragg (1999) as follows: VERCELLI BOOK (Vercelli, Biblioteca capitorare CXVII), one of the oldest of the four so-called Poetic Codices, is an anthology of religious prose and verse in Old English, dated palaeographically in the middle of the second half of the tenth century. It is written throughout by a single scribe who copied entirely mechanically and who shows no understanding of such brief quotations in Latin as appear. No satisfactory principle of arrangement has been adduced for the items, twenty-three of which are in prose (usually called homilies, although some have little homiletic content) and six of which are verse ... Codicological evidence suggests that the scribe assembled the material piecemeal, perhaps over an extended period of time, and drew upon a number of different copy-texts. The appearance in some later manuscripts of independent copies of more than one item from different sections of the codex suggests, however, that the same range of copy-texts was available to other scribes, and it seems probable that the Vercelli scribe drew principally on the resources of a single library. Linguistic evidence points to the scribe having been trained in the south-east, and the closest textual links of items in the book are with manuscripts associated with Canterbury and Rochester. We have no knowledge of the book's earliest provenance, but eleventh-century pen-trials suggest that it remained in England long enough to be used as a copy-text, while a Latin psalter quotation in a north Italian form of the early twelfth century shows that it had reached Italy by c.1100. ... Some of the prose remained unpublished until 1981. Scragg (1970: 16) further comments on the linguistic importance of the codex, as well as on its relative neglect: ... the Vercelli Book is ... the earliest extant collection of homilies in the vernacular.